A Washington Post columnist recently attacked a Nobel Prize winner by claiming that the scientific consensus that backs climate change is essentially a religious institution.

“Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming,” Charles Krauthammer said on PBS’s Inside Washington Saturday.

He continued, “Look, everything is – it’s a religion.”

Host Gordon Peterson kicked off the discussion, quoting former vice president Al Gore in a recent interview with a New York Times columnist.

““There is about four percent more water vapor in the atmosphere today than there was in 1970,” Gore told Gail Collins.

Gore further explained that the extra water appeared because the warmer oceans and air returned to earth as heavier precipitation.

However, this scientific fact escaped Krauthammer who instead called for proof that climate change is wrong.

“You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming, and I’ll be surprised,” he said.

Krauthammer would indeed be surprised because the climate science community unanimously agreed that human industry directly effects the Earth’s climate.

“It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases,” the US government’s Global Change Research Program reported. [PDF] “Such studies have only recently been used to determine the causes of some changes in extremes at the scale of a continent. Certain aspects of observed increases in temperature extremes have been linked to human influences.”

Their summary concluded: “In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity, and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights.

“Current and future impacts resulting from these changes depend not only on the changes in extremes, but also on responses by human and natural systems.”

This video is of PBS’s Inside Washington, broadcast Feb. 5, 2011, as sniped by climatebrad.